The Writing Room

Overview

The Writing Room is a meetup, hosted on the website Meetup.com, for collaborative writing. Official projects are updated and published under this organization.

How Does It Work

The process for creating a new fictional medium is always variable, and depends on the idea, themes, presentation style, format, etc. For the time being, we are working with short stories, and experimenting with a number of organizational structures.

For the time being, we try to abstract the creation of a fictional medium in the following steps:

1. Premise - we try to come up with the concept for the story.
   • Outcome: a short summary, which should set up the central characters, themes, and main plotline.
2. Detailing - we start adding more details and characters to the story, without diversions.
   • Outcome: a big-picture list of events, which should contain the following:
     • Character(s) and/or Object(s)
     • Time and/or Place (if applicable)
     • Event
3. Stopping Points - In order to divide the work into manageably writeable set of paragraphs, we will need to set up a number of stopping points, which will have the following properties:
   • Development state of the story
   • State of objects and characters
   • Any other notable information the next person should be aware of
4. Writing - We start writing the small parts set up in the stopping points. Each person takes one, or more parts, and they write that part.
   • Outcome: complete first draft of the story
5. Review - Each of the small parts is given to someone else for review. In the review, the reviewer gives a comment on what needs to be reviewed.
   • Outcome: each small part is reviewed, and approved if there are no review comments.
6. Amendments [if needed] - Corrections for the small parts are done.
   • Outcome: all review comments are addressed. This is going to be the second draft.
7. Read the Full Story - Each person reads the full story. Also, additional people are given the story to read, and to give their comments.
   • Outcome: the full first draft of the story is reviewed, and approved if there are no review comments.
8. Address Full review comments - Collectively, we address all review comments.
   • Outcome: address all review comments.
9. Publication - publish the story on the website.
   • Outcome: the finalized story is published. This is canon.